seized and, regardless of their being
the only mainstay of their families, were taken captive, and children of
eight were captured and presented to the recruiting authorities as being
of the obligatory age of twelve. But despite all this hunting, many
communities were not able to furnish their quota of soldiers, and the
number of "penal" recruits from among the Kahal elders was very
considerable.

[Footnote 1: See above, p. 60.]

Weeping and moaning resounded in the neighborhood of the recruiting
stations in the Jewish towns where parents and relatives took leave from
their dear ones who were doomed to a perpetual barrack life. And yet the
fury of the Government was not satisfied. In 1853 new "temporary rules"
were issued, "by way of experiment," whereby not only communities but
also individuals among Jews were granted the right of offering as their
substitutes any fellow-Jew from another city than his own who was caught
without a passport. Any Jew who happened to absent himself from his
place of residence without a passport could be seized and drafted into
service as a substitute for a regular recruit due from the family of the
captor. The "captive," regardless of age, was made a soldier, and the
captor was given a receipt for one recruit.

A new ferocious hunt began. The official "captors" employed by the
Kahals were no longer the only ones to prowl after living prey. The
chase was now taken up by every private individual who wished to find a
substitute for a member of his family, or who simply wanted to turn a
penny by selling his recruiting receipt. Hordes of Jewish bandits sprang
up who infested the roads and the inns, and by trickery or force made
the travellers part with their passports and then dragged them to the
recruiting stations as "captives" to be sent into the army. Never before
had the Jewish masses, yielding to pressure from above, sunk to such
depths of degradation. The Jew became a beast of prey to his fellow-Jew.
Jews were afraid of budging an inch from their native cities. Every
passer-by was suspected of being a captor or a bandit. The recruiting
inquisition of Nicholas inflicted upon the Jews the utmost limit of
martyrdom. It set Jew against Jew, called forth "a war of all against
all," threw the tortured and the torturers into one heap, and sullied
the Jewish soul.

All this took place while the Crimean War was going on. The Russian
army, on the altar of which so many human sacrifices had bee